Fine line black tattoo of a paper aeroplane with a dashed flight path looping behind it, on the back of a shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paper aeroplane with dashed flight path on shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small paper aeroplane is drawn in thin black outline, flying to the left with a dashed line trailing behind it and curving into a loop. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the design is rendered in black ink only. The tattoo sits in the centre of a bare shoulder and back, with the rest of the skin and a dark top filling the rest of the frame.

Fine line Shoulder Paper plane Dashed line Loop

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third plane of the morning came off the 7.14 to Hereford with a biro note folded inside its wing, which is how I knew someone had wanted it found. I work the lost property office at Ashbury Junction, so I get the umbrellas, the wedding shoes, and whatever people leave on the 4.50 when they are too busy crying to notice their own hands are empty.

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Paper planes are rarer. Most people bring them in by accident, tucked in coat pockets, and most are crumpled past flying. This one was crisp, folded from a sheet of what looked like a old timetable. The note said only: Tell Dev the loop was on purpose. I have been trying to work out who Dev is for a week.

I kept it on the shelf above the kettle, between a tartan flask and a pair of reading glasses nobody claimed. On Thursday a man in a waxed jacket came asking after his daughter's coat, and when he turned to go his eyes caught on the plane and he went very still. He said that when his daughter was nine she had thrown one off the footbridge every day of one summer, and that she always made it loop once before the wind took it. A plane should show you where it has been before it goes anywhere new, she told him.

I gave him the plane. He didn't ask me to find her and I didn't ask where she was. Some things leave a station on their own timetable. All I can do is keep the shelf dusted and the kettle hot for whoever comes back looking.